FutureTech Racing becomes the first team to win a motor-sport grand prix without a human driver.The teams engineers discover a regulation loophole that allows them to install a self-driving AI.Initial tests are a failure until they add behavioural models of the other drivers.

A series on smart technology technology and autonomous vehicles is running when a self-driving Uber car goes astray. It probably does not mark the end of the technology. However it causes us to remember the true nature of what we are doing and how the public may not forever sustain its enthusiasm for digital products or its willingness to serve as the test subjects for new ideas.

@Regranned from @topflightconsciousness - Starting to feel like Minority Report 😧 - You will walk in, walk out, get billed and go home with stuff. #Amazon will have collected massive psychographic information about you. What items did you look at? How long did you stare? Did you read the ingredients? Did you frown or smile? Just see what awaits you when you go shopping again… ads, coupons, verbal encouragements, etc. Go home to your computer and start browsing – watch what ads appear onscreen. This is far from humorous and portends a #ScientificDictatorship from which there is no escape.

For the past year, Amazon employees have been test driving #AmazonGo, an experimental convenience store in downtown Seattle. The idea is to let consumers walk in, pick up items and then pay for them without ever standing in line at a cashier. Amazon is vague on the mechanics, but the store relies on a mobile app and some of the same sensing technology that powers #selfdrivingcars to figure out who is buying what.

Employees have tried to fool the technology. One day, three enterprising Amazonians donned bright yellow Pikachu costumes and cruised around grabbing sandwiches, drinks and snacks. The algorithms nailed it, according to a person familiar with the situation, correctly identifying the employees and charging their Amazon accounts, even though they were obscured behind yellow polyester.
Amazon Go represents Amazon.com Inc.’s most ambitious effort yet to transform the brick-and-mortar shopping experience by eliminating the checkout line, saving customers time and furthering the company’s reputation for convenience.

The push into groceries is a way for the company to get consumers to shop at Amazon more often. In September, the e-commerce giant acquired #WholeFoodsMarket for $13.7 billion and has been cutting prices at the upscale grocery chain to drive traffic. On Wednesday, #WholeFoods began offering deep discounts on #Thanksgiving merchandise, including antibiotic-free turkeys, and signaled that the markdowns will get more aggressive as it adopts Amazon’s Prime subscription service. Shares at #Kroger and #Sprouts tumbled after the announcement. - #regrann

Over the last week I’ve been a bit absent with blog posts for studio, mainly because of my other classes taking up all my time as assignment were due. But now for the next 3 weeks I can focus solely on studio!

First things first, I’ll give an overview of two of the readings I did for TransD. These readings all related to self driving cars and AI

Asimov’s ‘‘three laws of robotics’’ and machinemetaethics - Susan Leigh AndersonAs the title suggests the main focus of this article is focused around the “three laws of robotics”,

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow ahuman being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where suchorders would conflict with the first law.3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does notconflict with the first or second law (Asimov 1976 , 1984).

A specific part of this article interested me and that was about the story of “Andrew”, a fictional robot that is sentient in the book “The Bicentennial Man”. Asimov actually says that his three laws are wrong when it comes to someone who has the intellectual intelligence of Andrew. He states that it shouldn’t have to be a slave to humans which it would have to be if it followed the three laws. It’s an interesting topic that will definitely be something that will be a large topic of interest when AI begin to become self aware, if they should be given rights or not. Another section of the article that I found to be something that future developers of AI need to read was “The ultimate goal of machine ethics, I believe, is to create a machine that follows an ideal ethical principle or set of ethical principles, that is to say, it is guided by this principle or these principles in the decisions it makes about possible courses of action it could take. We can say, more simply, that this involves ‘‘adding an ethical dimension’’ to the machine.”

Whether or not we can have a sound ethical principle to program these AI with is another story, as with ethics it’s always a matter of opinion as to what set of ethics are the right ones to believe in. I do believe that aspects of utilitarianism need to be involved, but with everything, utilitarianism has its major flaws.

The second article was Can you program self-driving cars? - Noah J.GoodallWhat interested me most about this was more about the implications of what programming self driving cars in a specific way. What I mean by this is that if you have a self-driving car on a three lane motorway and there are two cars on either side of it, one truck and one small car. Logically the self-driving car will position itself closer to the smaller car because it there was a crash it will have a better chance statistically to come off better. The implications of this information getting out would be fewer people driving less small cars because why should they put themselves at a higher risk of crashing with a self-driving car. It’s interesting to see how there can sometimes be hidden implications even if they are so simple. This is something developers need to focus on as all of those aspects need to be checked.

Google opened up a separate company, Waymo, to develop self-driving cars. I really can’t wait till they exist, are affordable, and I can have one. Animating thus idea was a bigger challenge than I thought. The cars were going by too quickly to see the people inside but then, a-ha! Traffic! Still not great, but better.
#ink #animation #news #automation #selfdrivingcars #technology #artistsoninstagram #instaartist #draweveryday #dailydrawing #dailysketch

“when automated teller machines were developed, many people thought ATMs would put most bank tellers out of work. Yet the impact on teller jobs turned out to be much milder than pessimists thought. ATMs made it cheaper to open a bank branch, allowing banks to open many more branches in the 1990s. As a result, teller employment grew from the 1980s through 2007.
[..]
there are still about half a million people working as tellers — about as many as in the early 1980s.”

“The federal government says that when it comes to regulating self-driving cars, computers and software systems can be considered the “driver” of the vehicle.
[..]
it’s just a starting point for figuring out how to update the arcane labyrinth of rules that govern how our cars work now.
[..]
“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the SDS [self-driving system], and not to any of the vehicle occupants,”
[..]
But “where technology meets law, the devil is in the details.”
[..]
that doesn’t mean they’re easy to update.
Defining the car’s operating system as its driver brings up two big problems. The first is that many of NHTSA’s regulations explicitly refer to human anatomy. The rule regarding the car’s braking system, for example, says it “shall be activated by means of a foot control.” The rules around headlights and turn signals refer to hands. NHTSA can easily change how it interprets those rules, but there’s no reasonable way to define Google’s software—capable as it is—as having body parts.
[..]
Getting an exemption to one of these rules is a long and difficult process, Walker Smith says. But “the regular rulemaking process is even more onerous.”
The second new problem is that the feds don’t have the tools they need to test new systems. The rule concerning rear visibility, for example, requires that the vehicle “display a rearview image (of a specified area of certain dimensions behind the vehicle) to the vehicle operator.” NHSTA’s happy to say that the operator is in fact a pile of software, and there’s no talk of eyeballs here.

The problem is that the feds don’t have an established way to verify that that image is making its way to the inhuman operator. It “would be unable to conduct confirmatory testing,” the letter says. Even if it wants to certify Google’s car for use by the public, it would have to first create a new process for making sure the vehicle works as mandated.
[..]
The good news in both cases is that the feds are being surprisingly flexible in how they handle the emergence of autonomous driving.”